You've heard of the Mercury 7 astronauts; they became the backbone of the NASA program and inspiration to an entire generation of young people.   But you may not have known there were also a Mercury 13 - and they were women.

In the early years of the space race two men sought to test a scientifically simple yet culturally complicated theory - that women might be better suited for space travel than men.

In 1960 a woman in space instead of a man was a revolutionary idea: 75% of American women did not work outside the home and females were banned from military flight service.   Wives were required to have their husband's permission to take out a bank loan, buy property, or purchase large household goods such as a refrigerator.

'Blue haze' is a natural occurrence over heavily forested areas around the world but natural does not always mean good.  Still, while blue haze may be formed by natural emissions of chemicals, human activities can worsen it to the point of affecting the world's weather and even cause potential climate problems, according to a new study.

When you walk through a forest or even a large grassy area, it's not uncommon to be able to smell the plants around you, such as pine trees or other vegetation. That smell is nature's way of naturally making organic gases produced by the plants themselves, often millions of tons per day.

It seems like common sense that too much of even good things can be bad.  Everyone has heard about the damage that reactive oxygen species (ROS) – aka free radicals – can do to our bodies by now and the sales pitches for antioxidant vitamins, skin creams or "superfoods" that can stop them - so many that we will shut off comments for this article because it will be all spam.

There is ample scientific evidence that chronic ROS production within cells can contribute to human diseases, including insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes but a new report in Cell Metabolism, says that low levels of ROS – and hydrogen peroxide in particular - might actually protect us from diabetes, by improving our ability to respond to insulin signals. 

Recent correspondence directed me to the fact that there is a Philosophy section in Scientific Blogging. This is something I have kept away from, since my view of the subject follows the Pooh-Goethe paradigm [1]. However, I have just read In The Beginning - A Rough Guide To A Physicalist View Of Everything which introduced the subject of metaphysics. Now it may be customary to think that metaphysics is “that which lies beyond physics”, so the more we get our physics right, the better the metaphysics. But then Darwin had a different perspective. In his Notebook M (1838) he wrote

To test whether my belief that homeopathy is not an evidence-based rational system of medicine is reasonable or just prejudice on my part, I did a quick experiment using Google Scholar. (This was done Jan 17, 2008)

A "layman's meta-analysis" of sorts. Not supremely scientific alas (although perhaps somewhat reminiscent of a GCSE science project ), but the best I could do early in the morning with only vending-machine coffee to keep my brain from sleep ;-) 

Tyrannosaurus rex has had an interesting few weeks - Raptorex kriegsteini, a man-sized ancestor, was unveiled a few weeks ago and now we find out that Alioramus altai—a horned, long-snouted, gracile cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex—shared the same environment with larger, predatory relatives.

Tyrannosaurs are bipedal predators that lived at the end of the Cretaceous (from 85 million years to approximately 65 million years ago) is currently known from several groups of fossils. One subfamily from North America includes Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus, while the other subfamily bridges Asia and North America and includes Tyranosaurus, Tarbosaurus, and Alioramus.

Both T.

Outreach campaigns like 'Rock the Vote' don't generally do a lot for the image of young voters - if you're in the tank for one party the other party gives up on you and your own party takes you for granted because they are going after undecided people in swing states who keep their votes up for grabs.   But get-out-the-vote campaigns are essential, politicos say, because students are flaky, so if they're in your party you don't have to listen to them on issues but you have to rent a bus, take them to the booths and buy them a sandwich to get them to actually vote.

Can air pollution trigger appendicitis?  Yes, says a study conducted by researchers at the University of Calgary, University of Toronto and Health Canada who looked at 5191 adults admitted to hospitals in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Fifty-two per cent of admissions occurred between April and September, the warmest months of the year in Canada during which people are more likely to be outside.

Therefore, air pollution must be the culprit if your correlation-causation arrow is more like a Scud missile.

Sitting up straight in a chair is obviously good for posture but it can also make you unconsciously more confident, say Ohio State University researchers.   

They found that people who were told to sit up straight were more likely to believe thoughts they wrote down while in that posture concerning whether they were qualified for a job while those who were slumped over their desks were less likely to accept written-down feelings about their own qualifications.

The results are an indication that our body posture can affect not only what others think about us, but also how we think about ourselves, said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State.

You would think religious people and atheists don't have a lot in common regarding thinking but they do, says a study by UCLA, Pepperdine and USC neuroscientists.    

It's tough to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, so calibrate accordingly, but in a neuroimaging study the researchers found that while the human brain responded very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, was governed by the same areas in the brain.